From Modernity to After-Modernity (50)

I'm writing this series to try making sense out of our present context from the perspective of an artist. An artistic production should reflect the present Zeitgeist and within this Zeitgeist it should detect the emergence of the future. But having lost the supply of any worldview to illustrate, after the failure of Modernism, visual artists are stuck with one and only one sensical perspective. This is to be visionaries. The work of art has indeed to awaken the observer on how the present is shaping the future and only visionaries can do that...

Introduction (continued. 3)

About divination

This “Book 3” is about getting a feel of what the future has in store for humanity and more broadly what the future has in store for life on earth. The future is perceived as being unknown so it is imperative for those who want to talk about it to clarify the methodology of their approach. This is what I propose to do here after.

For me writing is about putting my thinking in words and as I wrote here above “thinking is the conscious expression of ideas and feelings that are contained in the conscious mind”. That being said my thoughts and actions are being put in motion by letting my creativity free to run wild and unhindered by will or want which I find to be paralyzing the individual’s spontaneity. Spontaneity is suggesting freedom but more than that spontaneity brings about lightness, naturalness, in other words it infuses life in the creation which gives an organic quality to its form. Letting the subconscious initiate actions and thoughts is a conscious decision. I want the form of my thought, actions, and work to have the same organic feel as life itself and experience shows that the only way to reach that particular kind of quality is by putting the subconscious in charge of the initiation of thought and creation...

What I mean by this is that I engage, in my thinking as well as in my writing and painting and more broadly in my life, by letting my subconscious initiate the action. But the subconscious intervention is only phase one of the action which corresponds to the injection of subconscious spontaneity that is followed immediately by my conscious mind tempering the subconscious visions in a following phase two. This tempering is like a confrontation of the unconscious production of visions resulting from phase one with the lucid observation of the conscious mind. Phase two appears then like:

1. a clean-up of all the non-sensical elements traced by the subconscious in its visions
2. the completion of the tracing of any impressions left by the subconscious act that I find are sensical but not necessarily finished. Such a process, first described by Leonardo Da Vinci in his notebooks, adds a surprisingly lively touch to a work’s formal rendering which suggests lightness and a natural growth of meaning out of the organic form.

The finishing of a work, or its phase three, is then the polishing of form and content, in auto-pilot mode, while the conscious mind slowly integrates the meaning emerging on the canvas. The whole process is like a deep meditation; dreaming while being awake.

My personal approach to creation and to life is thus similar to the approach of knowledge that I described earlier. I want indeed all of my creations, – knowledge – writing – painting – life, to be directly useful for my conscious mind. Such a project is a life project which means that someone pursuing such a project devotes his entire life to increasing her/his consciousness. And to succeed in such an endeavor I feel that I have no other choice but to let my subconscious take the lead. The confrontation of its productions leads to their integration in the conscious mind as creations that make sense and so they participate in increasing one’s knowledge and also the consciousness of what this knowledge pertains to.

As I stated earlier “I became a thinking painter by sheer necessity. I was confronted with what can only be described as the utter confusion that is overwhelming the artworld in Late-Modernity” and so my personal research naturally started as an inquiry into ‘what is art’ “. In “Book 2. Volume 5. About the arts” I proposed that philosophic rationalism and science definitively separated the trinity that substantiated the traditional focus on wisdom through the interconnection of – knowledge, – worldviews, – arts and as a result knowledge, worldviews and the arts lost the traditional function that was assigned to them since the emergence of tribal societies. In other words this trinity has been in play since the origin of tribal societies somewhere between 150,000 years and 70,000 years ago and the start of high-Modernity sometimes in the 2nd part of the 18th century.

The fact is that the separation, of – knowledge, – worldviews, – arts, has been in place for a very short time on the span of societal evolution. But its impact on societies at large has been devastating. Societies lost their men of knowledge and the supply of the worldview that earlier was shared by all citizens. In the art world that separation cut the artists from the supply of meaning that they had been in charge of illustrating since the time of the societal mutation of bands into tribes. In the meantime capital holders sized upon philosophic rationalism to target new profit sources by investing in science and technology.

That separation, of – knowledge, – worldviews, – arts, then combined with the investments in science and technology by capital holders and that combination unleashed a revolution in the Zeitgeist or spirit of the time. Perceptions were changing so rapidly that past ideas and practices suddenly appeared rigid and dogmatic. Scientists were discovering deeper layers of meaning to reality and artists wanted to emulate them by giving visual signs of these deeper layers of meaning.

It is in this Zeitgeist that Modernism arose around 1900. In short Modernism was the abandonment of past ways while the artists took upon themselves the challenge to give visual signs of reality that penetrate further than the first dimension of what the eyes can see. Unfortunately they were not equipped to narrate a new worldview and their effort rapidly ended in total confusion. This is when the traditional function of the arts has been recuperated and transformed by capital holders in luxurious commodities and objects of speculation for the power elite.

Since the end of the 2nd world war the artworld has been made the vehicles of ideology for mind manipulation in order:

• to justify the exercise of power by the political decision makers
• to increase the demand of goods and services
• to exclude “the other” which in this case was the socialist and communist movance.

But in this process the traditional function of visual arts morphed into:

• design to dress new goods,
• graphism to manipulate people’s minds,
• the use of new “moving pictures” technologies to visually entertain the citizens while also manipulating their minds.

As a matter of fact knowledge, worldviews, and art got separated in the fog generated by the level playing field of the market for ideas:

• science took the traditional place of knowledge and the men of knowledge, as well as the scientists, were now left to peddle their knowledge and knowings on the level playing field of the market for ideas where they encountered the competition of all kinds of charlatans. The resulting brouhaha acted as a deep fog – hiding the financing of science by capital holders, – hiding the substitution of the traditional man of knowledge by the scientist.
• with the disappearance of the man of knowledge the maintenance of worldviews and their sharing with the citizenry suddenly vanished replaced by science. But science is not a worldview. It is not supplying a readily available narrative about what reality is all about. It is merely a method of communication between scientists meant to ensure that new hypotheses are replicable and so can eventually be confirmed or infirmed.
• the vanishing of the maintenance and sharing of worldviews immediately handicapped the artist. He had traditionally given visual signs of the meaning of the supplied worldview and to counter its loss the artist now was suddenly obliged to invent the meaning of his own narrative. Not equipped to do so the arts soon broke down and society at large got the victim of a loss of societal and existential meaning. In the name of spurring creativity the individuals were then encouraged to invent their own meaning about what reality is all about but as a result societies atomized and are now dieing...

My ambition as a thinking painter was to make sense of what had happened. I deeply felt that painters had lost touch with sensical content and I was betting on thinking to show me the path to a painting content that would result in a meaning that makes sense in our present context. What I try to describe here is the process of thinking and painting that I developed along the last 40 years as an answer to my quest for visual sense... and over the years this process engulfed my entire being.

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